11. Performed at Dance Uncensored 2011 – under the combined item, and where I met so many crazy people – Charlotte, VK and Mereith just to name a few! I loved every moment of it. (Weiting, Ming Jie, Adinda!!)

(this is during our outing! :D)

12. Developed my first iPad app with my team – BattleWars. (not published :p)

13. Hall freak in action again – won the Cultural Medallion of Eusoff Hall. Thank you 🙂

14. Finished Portal 2 in the midst of exams. LOL. (It’s an awesome game – go play it!)

16. Made a Friday parody with my friends for another friend’s birthday (twins!) 🙂

17. Started playing Minecraft. DAMN AWESOME.

18. Lost a bet for having the.. best results and treated all of them to Xiao Long Bao buffet. ($$$$ fly away)

19. Choreographed for the first time, with Wilfred for Rag Day. This was a special one because it was a collaboration between Eusoff Hall and Temasek Hall. Had so much fun with the choreography and dancers. 🙂

(.. hello gay buddy.)

20. Celebrated one of my best friend’s birthday at some place, and we prepared a song for him 🙂 It was so last minute but it turned out pretty well!

21. Joined NUS Dance Blast. I LOVE BLAST!

22. Performed for EMCC 2011 – A Series of Unfortunate Events as my first Blast! performance. I love the people here 🙂
Special shoutouts to Nic and Glenn!

(USA!)

(Spam photo!)

23. Went to watch The Real Group in Singapore with my A Cappella friends. They are seriously the best a cappella group in the world.

24. Sang for MDIS Graduation Ceremony for the 3rd time 🙂

25. Formed RANXM! ❤

26. My second piece of a cappella arrangement, I’m Yours was sung by the freshies in Eusoff A Cappella 🙂 This one really means a lot to me because it’s my full arrangement 🙂

The logical continuation to the iPad module, the Facebook module has been known for killing people during the semesters. And yes, I am here to prove that CS3216 will take up a whole lot of your semester time, albeit slightly less than CS3217 in my opinion. I guess I didn’t take the module with the correct mindset (I didn’t think far enough), but this is definitely a module that is worth your every sweat and second. This review is written from a software engineer’s point of view

Lecture – Lectures are mostly conducted by guest lecturers, to expose you to basically all the problems that require solving in the real world. It’s really an eye opener to realize that the world really needs a lot of software engineers and people with awesome ideas. no webcast but there isn’t a point anywayAssignments – There were two assignments, both like mini-final-projects in that you have to develop an app that solves a problem. They were both quite fun, and useful in letting you pick up the skills required for modern web development. (PHP, HTML5, AWS etc) There’s also a blogging component, which in my opinion is really helpful, as it helps you consolidate your thoughts onto what you’ve learnt in the lectures and serves as a progress tracker (of yourself) at the same time.Project – CS3216 is really not a programming module – you have to think about the problem that you want to solve, and develop an app that solves this problem. Many of the groups were really impressive in that they worked with external partners to come up with apps with backing up. I guess that’s where my group fell short.

Again, I would like to thank my teammates in the assignments and final project for being damn awesome and coming up with cool apps. 🙂

I have to say, Razvan is really a very knowledgeable lecturer. Respect.

This module teaches you about the underlying concepts beneath a programming language, although I would say it has slight overlapping elements with computer hardware knowledge. I had an interesting (and hard) time learning Prolog (Razvan loves Prolog), as its concepts were completely different from anything else I’ve learned. Practice is definitely required to understand most of the things taught.

Lecture – Razvan tends to not finish his lectures in time so sometimes you would have to self study. But other than that, he explains concepts rather clearly and if you can bear with his semi-boring tone (and concentrate), the lectures are really helpful. Be sure to take notes. webcastedTutorial – The lecturer will post the answers online, so unless you have completely no idea how to do some certain questions (which you should, towards the end of the syllabus), it should be okay to skip them. The problem is that the final exam questions are NOTHING like those in the tutorial. They are like 100 levels up.Problem Sets – These are tutorial questions on steroids mostly (with a few easy exceptions), and I spent a lot of time doing each of them. They really serve as good practice for the concepts though, and should be attempted (even after you overshot the cap – the total marks for all Problem Sets exceed the maximum you can score with them).

The 40% CA marks are easily scorable as long as you do all your tutorials and Problem Sets diligently, so make sure you get those marks in full. My midterm was quite difficult whereas the Final Exam was doable as long as you practice well and read through the tutorials. (Problem Sets questions are at a higher level)

My grade: A-
My rating: Concepts are difficult to grasp, and practice is very important.

Edit 23/12/2012: As requested by the module lecturers, please take note that the structure of this module is different in different semesters. That includes but is not limited to:

Lecturer

Syllabus

Module score breakdown

Textbook

Final year examination paper format

If you would still like to read the review (which may or may not apply to future semesters), you may zoom in the page.

One of the easier modules of the semester. Contents are largely surface level at best, and not too difficult to understand. If you are lucky, you may get questions in my final exam that are similar to the past year papers. Of course I guess the bell curve would be steep too. Make sure you have sufficient Java/C++ knowledge for the programming assignment. I like the content a lot though, as they are all relevant to our IT life everyday.

Lecture – All (or almost all) the content Prof Anand lectures are from the textbook, and I find that the textbook helps a lot if you can’t understand the concepts sometimes (or if you don’t pay attention like me). Other than that, he’s an okay lecturer. Take notes! no webcastTutorial – Tutorial questions should be quite easy as they are mostly just regurgitations of lecture concepts and simple calculations.Homework Assignments – Slightly harder variants of tutorial questions. (Read: variants, because the questions are really.. the same..) Make sure you score full marks for them too.Programming Assignment – For my semester we needed to create a Windows client for sending and receiving mail. As I had no experience in Java GUI, I ended up using NetBeans IDE’s integrated GUI builder (it’s really useful!). It shouldn’t be a big problem as they have sample codes for the backend part (sockets).

There really isn’t much to say about this module because it’s really not difficult if you put in some effort.

Another lightweight module in terms of workload, but concepts are tricky and requires time to understand. I didn’t buy the textbook, but I felt that the lectures were sufficient. The more abstract section about NP completeness was a complete disaster though, it’s a lot harder than normal algorithm analysis. As there are very few components that contribute to your final grade, be sure to prepare well for each of them.

Lecture – Rahul attempts to explain the algorithms discussed in lecture clearly by drawing a lot and taking a lot of time. Make sure you take down notes from these discussions. He tends to confuse himself though 😛 not webcastedTutorial – Be sure to attempt the tutorial questions and prepare for class, not because of the 5% participation grade, but because they are the only form of practice you can have (aside from the textbook, which I didn’t have..) The tutorial questions really help a lot in understanding the algorithms.Lecture Quizzes – Should be manageable if you follow the lectures consistently. Algorithm design requires some analytic thinking though.

The midterm is a very large component of your grade so make sure to score well in that. I was lucky as Rahul gave hints in the midterm questions.

My grade: A+
My rating: Consistent work should get you through, but maybe not the NP-completeness part..

No tutorial yet again! Steeeeeeeeep bell curve, I would say this module really requires critical thinking and an adequate level of preparation. The module content is definitely interesting and very applicable in real life.

Lecture – I wasn’t concentrating for most of the lectures (8am.. zzz..), and that was a mistake – do pay attention to his lectures to understand how he analyses news article and information. He cracks jokes to keep his lectures interesting. Do go for lectures to copy down the ‘tutorial answers’ though. no webcastAssignments – Two article reviews, one newspaper article and one research article. I’d recommend you go for picking a newspaper article with a research article source, so that there isn’t a need to reanalyze information and save precious words (for the word limit). (It’s kind of confusing to explain it, but if you take the module you’ll know what I mean.)